THIS IS beyond any doubt that in India straying husbands have been branded the ‘driving force’ behind the high incidence of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. The Truck drivers, commercial sex workers and economically backward classes are the main categories in spreading HIV and other such diseases.

A recent study published in British Medical Journal has shown a high prevalence of HIV, herpes and syphilis among married couples across the country, and 85 per cent of the time, it is the men who bring home the HIV infection. “Male sexual activity outside marriage seems to be the driving force for India’s HIV /STD (sexually transmitted diseases) epidemic. In any STD, the male partner introduced

the infection majority of the time, with statistics of 85.4 per cent for HIV, 75 per cent for syphilis and 64 per cent for herpes,” the authors of the study concluded.

A Chennai-based sexologist Dr Narayan Reddy had predicted the role of the wayward husbands in spreading STDs back in 1997. “Both government and non-profit AIDS control organizations have been concentrating on the so-called vulnerable population, namely the Truck Drivers,  commercial sex workers  and economically backward people, as they are easy to identify. However the middle and upper middle class has been ignored. The fact that many married men and women are indulging in casual sex has not been looked at as a potential STD risk,” says Dr Narayan Reddy.

Compared to 10 years ago, married men tend to have casual sexual flings today, rather than going to commercial sex workers. “Men who stray do not use protection as they assume they are safe because the partner is from a ‘good’ family, and not a sex worker. They contract the infection from a casual sexual encounter with a stranger, pass it on to the wife, and maybe infect the girlfriend as well,” says Dr Reddy pointing out that it was about time that NGOs and  NACO embarked on the difficult task of controlling STDs in upper  middle class population and high-end sex workers.